Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Too scary, too sexy: Adults are hijacking Halloween

Just your average neighborhood scene of terror...

By Linda Federico-O’Murchu

On a front lawn
in suburban New Jersey, ghouls are dismembering a bloody “corpse” with a
chainsaw. A blood-curdling scream pierces the night as plastic rats
with glowing red eyes lurk behind tombstones and freakishly huge spiders
crawl up the house.

For years this house, like many others, has
been displaying elaborate Halloween decor designed to scare the wits out
of innocent passers-by. And while it achieves the desired shock effect
for adults, a fair number of children are carried away from the creepy scene in tears.

What’s happened to Halloween? Adults are taking it over: Americans are expected to spend $8 billion on Halloween this year, according to CNBC, up
16 percent from 2011. That buys a lot of fake blood. A holiday that
used to mean homemade costumes, jack-o-lanterns and bobbing for apples
now means terrifying weapons, ghastly spurting “wounds” and nightmarish
creatures. In the name of shopping
for costumes or trick-or-treating, children are now routinely
confronted with images and ideas once reserved for R-rated horror
movies.

Have adults become so preoccupied with subjects like death and sex that they’ve hijacked Halloween?

Professor of anthropology Dr. Cindy Dell Clark says to some extent they have.

“The
real benefit of Halloween is for adults, not children,” she said.
“It’s one day where they can have the catharsis of just mocking death in
its face, lampooning it, pinning it up on their house. But,” she
cautioned, “for children it’s serious. At age six or seven, when adults
take them to a haunted house, they are truly frightened.”

Clark, the author of Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith: Children’s Myths in Contemporary America, studied six-and seven-year old children to assess their involvement with ritual and belief. In her 2005 study,
she said children who were shown printed images of traditional
Halloween icons like bats, spiders and haunted houses were frightened
“without exception.”

“Adults think these icons are fun. But
children don’t experience those symbols the same way adults think they
do,” she said. “Kids considered them to be so verboten, scary and
grotesque, they put the cards under the sofa so they wouldn’t have to
look at them.”

New York parent Caty Bartholomew said her daughter Claire had a similar reaction to Halloween imagery at that age.

“Between age two and five or six, Claire was just scared of Halloween in general,” she said. “It was over-stimulating. Then, at around seven, she decided she wanted to dress up as a fairy.”
Now 10, Claire said she likes Halloween -- in measured doses.

“I think it’s kind of fun-scary now,” she said. “Sometimes it’s fun to get scared just the right amount.”
Bartholomew
said she traditionally brings her daughter to a child-friendly parade
in their Brooklyn neighborhood that does not expose Claire to some of
the more graphic, adult elements of Halloween. What is harder to shield
her from, however, is what she calls “the sexification of Halloween.”

“If
you walk into a costume store you see a sexy fire fighter, a sexy
nurse, sexy everything. There’s something really offensive about taking
jobs that really help people and turning them into sex objects. Maybe
that’s really fuddyduddy of me, but it does bother me. Sexy nurse, sexy
doctor -- I just feel like, why?”
Bartholomew said they left the
store when the only vampire costume they could find was a “sexy
vampire.” “If your kid doesn’t fit into a kids costume any more, you’re
in trouble,” she said.

Not
surprisingly, teenagers are wasting no time jumping on the adult
bandwagon. One high school girl in Montclair, New Jersey recently
informed her mother that she and her friends had devised a plan to dress
up as “slutty fairytale characters” for Halloween.

“I think I’ll go as slutty Bo-Peep,” she said airily.

“Anything’s
that sexualized has a detrimental effect on a child,” warned New York
Child Psychologist Dr. Caire Ciliotta, who said the emphasis on adult
themes, combined with the rampant commercialization of Halloween, has
obscured its underlying meaning.

“It used to be called All Souls
Day, All Saints Day . . . there was a sense of honoring the dead,” she
said. “It was about the spirit returning. Now, if you talk to any kid
on the street, they have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Ciliotta said the kind of gory imagery children are exposed to at Halloween is particularly worrisome.
“Halloween
does traumatize children, because they are introduced to incredibly
violent, murderous images without any context,” she said. “A child
under five fundamentally would never have seen anything like that – it’s
their first encounter with violence, brutality, death. I promise you,
children aren’t asking to see that. It’s the parents who want to see it
and they bring the child along.”